Today is Friday the 13th, and although I've walked under ladders and had black cats cross my path and have lived to tell about it, the belief in evil times or omens still stirs something remote and uncomfortable. I think I know why this is: so much of life comes about without any foresight or planning that we come to believe, in our core, that something beyond us is pulling our strings. Especially with bad things. While superstition is often seen as confining, it might also be a little liberating: putting a name or date or action onto bad things in our lives takes away a little of the mystery. Just don't do anything dangerous or important on Friday the 13th. There. Problem solved.
Of course it is not. In my last published essay, "Hell House," I wrote of the good and the bad of the loopy decision I made to buy a wreck of a house. This caused a cascade of events that could not be foreseen by anything but hindsight, and even then, much was left to an irascible fate. As said, it worked out, in the long run, for the better. Then again, maybe not, but it worked out and life has been fairly good - after the steep price I paid for the obsession with fixing that house. A steep price that was charged with great disappointment.
Life is what happens while making plans for something else; the best laid plans of mice and men; the irony of tragedy and the folly of comedy. We have sayings and plays for life as it actually is, not as we hope it will be. Even the essay about odd fate was, at first, a disappointment. I had wanted an "oomph" at the end, a crowning insight into the whole affair. It did not come. Instead came a subtle hint that life works out if you let it, regardless. A week later, I went back to it to correct it.but couldn't. Like life, the essay wasn't what I had planned, but it worked out right, somehow. I had to leave it as it was. A disappointment, but then again, not; rather, the way it is.
Disappointment - it is a driving force in the world. For some it results in anger and violent actions; for others, fatalistic defeat and ennui. The first is like a child stomping his feet to get what he wants; the second, like the abused child who simply disappears into himself to avoid getting hurt again. If one wants to be far, to give the truth to the human condition, one can hardly blame those responses. We all feel them at times ourselves. Worse, some disappointments are so grave that it is hard to see that there could ever be a good side. The mass killers of the 20th century were children who were stomping their feet. For their victims, was there a bright side? This has always haunted me, and probably will continue to do so. Such outrageous suffering of so many innocents is beyond any reasoning, or any normal human conciliation. Not for all, though. Many of those others have been chronicled here, and I add another: the Dali Lama. Even with the mass murder, rape and ethnocide of his country by China,he remains confident, as if he knows a secret we don't. But to me, this is hard to reconcile with the suffering and the dead. I am no Dali Lama.
Still, in most circumstances, things DO seem to work out even as our plans are thwarted. To reiterate a personal note, the most bitter disappointment in my life was not receiving a permanent professional appointment for the years spent in graduate school. Yet I knew then, and know even better now, that that time was the lest spiritual and the most flawed (by frantic striving, envy, and stark competition) in my life. My failure, my great disappointment, was probably for the better.
Even if not, it is what has come to pass. If I were to believe in vindictive Fates who pulled our strings, I could be left bitter about my thwarted plans. But if I believed that I was part of a bigger whole, one that, in totality, was the only good, I could not justify wallowing in bitterness. What a waste that would be in my life, for it is overall very good, at least for now. Logically, this might seem to put the horse before the cart - if evil shows itself, doesn't that mean that life is evil, or at least under its sway? But it is not, not if we let life be; not if we keep our disappointment from entering our greater depths. For then, when the bad is over, it is good again. And maybe even better. On that, we will never know, but we can know that willed darkness creates more darkness, and light more light. Disappointment goes, and life moves on, if we let it. And in that, instead of defiance or defeat, we find growth and a little more of our soul. FK
Of course it is not. In my last published essay, "Hell House," I wrote of the good and the bad of the loopy decision I made to buy a wreck of a house. This caused a cascade of events that could not be foreseen by anything but hindsight, and even then, much was left to an irascible fate. As said, it worked out, in the long run, for the better. Then again, maybe not, but it worked out and life has been fairly good - after the steep price I paid for the obsession with fixing that house. A steep price that was charged with great disappointment.
Life is what happens while making plans for something else; the best laid plans of mice and men; the irony of tragedy and the folly of comedy. We have sayings and plays for life as it actually is, not as we hope it will be. Even the essay about odd fate was, at first, a disappointment. I had wanted an "oomph" at the end, a crowning insight into the whole affair. It did not come. Instead came a subtle hint that life works out if you let it, regardless. A week later, I went back to it to correct it.but couldn't. Like life, the essay wasn't what I had planned, but it worked out right, somehow. I had to leave it as it was. A disappointment, but then again, not; rather, the way it is.
Disappointment - it is a driving force in the world. For some it results in anger and violent actions; for others, fatalistic defeat and ennui. The first is like a child stomping his feet to get what he wants; the second, like the abused child who simply disappears into himself to avoid getting hurt again. If one wants to be far, to give the truth to the human condition, one can hardly blame those responses. We all feel them at times ourselves. Worse, some disappointments are so grave that it is hard to see that there could ever be a good side. The mass killers of the 20th century were children who were stomping their feet. For their victims, was there a bright side? This has always haunted me, and probably will continue to do so. Such outrageous suffering of so many innocents is beyond any reasoning, or any normal human conciliation. Not for all, though. Many of those others have been chronicled here, and I add another: the Dali Lama. Even with the mass murder, rape and ethnocide of his country by China,he remains confident, as if he knows a secret we don't. But to me, this is hard to reconcile with the suffering and the dead. I am no Dali Lama.
Still, in most circumstances, things DO seem to work out even as our plans are thwarted. To reiterate a personal note, the most bitter disappointment in my life was not receiving a permanent professional appointment for the years spent in graduate school. Yet I knew then, and know even better now, that that time was the lest spiritual and the most flawed (by frantic striving, envy, and stark competition) in my life. My failure, my great disappointment, was probably for the better.
Even if not, it is what has come to pass. If I were to believe in vindictive Fates who pulled our strings, I could be left bitter about my thwarted plans. But if I believed that I was part of a bigger whole, one that, in totality, was the only good, I could not justify wallowing in bitterness. What a waste that would be in my life, for it is overall very good, at least for now. Logically, this might seem to put the horse before the cart - if evil shows itself, doesn't that mean that life is evil, or at least under its sway? But it is not, not if we let life be; not if we keep our disappointment from entering our greater depths. For then, when the bad is over, it is good again. And maybe even better. On that, we will never know, but we can know that willed darkness creates more darkness, and light more light. Disappointment goes, and life moves on, if we let it. And in that, instead of defiance or defeat, we find growth and a little more of our soul. FK
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